before the footlights, fall on your knees and acknowledge God!  Rum had been driven from a saloon near this theater.  “Thank God,” said Beecher, “let us pray silently for the space of two minutes.  What a history has been here.  A place of fictitious joys but of real sorrows has been reformed.  It is open for God’s people to sing and pray in.  God be thanked that Heaven’s gates have been opened in this place of hell.”

Garrison saw the point.  Of the revival he wrote that it had “spread like an epidemic in all directions, over a wide extent of country.  Prayer meetings, morning, noon and night; prayer meetings in town, village, and hamlet, North and South.  The whole thing is an emotional contagion without principle.  This revival, judging from the past, will promote meanness, not manliness; delusion, not intelligence; the growth of bigotry, not of humanity; a spurious religion, not genuine piety.”

Theodore Parker denounced the mania too, and was attacked for it by Methodists and others.  He sew that the North had its rain gods, its prosperity gods, its bread and butter gods, its rituals and devotions for these gods; and that the South had the same number of gods.

What then of the law of God?  Douglas was at one with Garrison and Parker in this criticism of the religious mania.

Thus we talked along together.  The principal thing about Abigail was that she despised the South, but for the reason that there was nothing there but the political mind and that it was concerned almost entirely with the negro.  It had no literature.  Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell were producing works of merit; and the South was doing nothing.  Poe was born in Boston, had lived South, but had written out of nowhere.  He had died about a year before, discouraged and broken.

The most silent voice at the table was Dorothy’s.  She did not really enter into these discussions.  Her softer, altogether feminine nature was disturbed by these things.  Abigail began to laugh.  “Why,” she asked, “does every one say here ‘how’s your health’ instead of ‘good morning’ as they say in England?  People look careworn to me in America; they are spare and pallid.  Not many ruddy complexions.  Why all these sharp-faced, lantern-jawed, lean, sallow, hard-handed people?  Why this depression of spirits?  Perhaps they really get a thrill out of religion after all.  Why all these advertisements of quack remedies, why all this calling on God?  This is a place of bright sunshine and exhilarating air.  After all, I do not understand it.”

“All due to the habits of life,” said Aldington.  “Look at the fast eating—­look at them here.  Too much hot bread and sweets—­too much pie for breakfast.  Too much pork.  Too much living at hotels and boarding houses.  Too much drinking before meals; not enough wine and beer with meals.  Too much tobacco chewing.  No exercise.  Only the farmer, the laborer works.  They go too far.  But where do you see outdoor